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Talk:The ShineDragon Shining-Dragon/@comment-16193369-20141030231309/@comment-1610854-20191002173046
What I would typically classify as Battle Spirits power creep began around the mid-Heroes saga - when Burst spirits grew considerably in strength, while throwing the cost out of the window. From the view of the current era, you may scoff at this since Bursts are (typically) once-per-turn and easy to counter - most Bursts today have to do enormous amounts of stuff to matter. But back then strong Bursts were a really cheap way to take control of the game with unprecedented ease. And this is where it started going downhill. To mitigate the Burst prevalence, without directly countering it (so they could still sell their stuff), they drastically increased the power of the new spirits. Back then it was still feasible for a game not to be decided by turn 8-9, so Sword Brave saga introduced a lot of cost 6 or higher spirits that could do a whole lot more than before, including and not limited to the anime ace spirits. Add to that the greater Brave synergy that solved several problems a Brave user would face during the Brave era, including the high cost of the combined cards that had to be paid, and things started getting iffy. The solution to this was, of course, in true-and-tested Bandai way, to go one step beyond and introduce a new card type that literally gave zero fucks about everything that came before it. This is basically what is most traditionally understood as "power creep", although it began quite a bit earlier. Basically Bandai decided that the game state was too volatile and the only way to mitigate the impact of the previous era's powerplays without introducing even more OTK potential, was to simply make them not work. That was the job of the Ultimates, and in the beginning most Ultimate cards had lackluster effects, but they could stonewall the opponent since most of their effects would not work against them. This was a bad, bad idea, one that Bandai clearly didn't think through. After the initial wave of "boring" Ultimates came and went, they had to come up with more exciting things to maintain interest. And so the effects of Ultimates spiralled out of control quickly, much like spirit effects in the previous sagas - and now they were unstoppable, untouchable machines of destruction, which to make matters even funnier, after a while could also even Brave. Meanwhile, the attempts to design spirits that could feasibly counter Ultimates were half-hearted at best and did not change anything significantly, until the beginning of the Burning Soul saga, where the need to make spirits relevant again led to a lot of outrageous blanket effects which could cover both spirits and Ultimates. As a matter of fact I think that due to the hard-OPT clause forced by the Soul Core, Burning Soul did SLIGHTLY better at controlling the power creep than it otherwise would have, since many of the more powerful effects were locked behind Soul Core usage. Of course that didn't stop abusive shit cards like Burning Souldragon. Then we went into the God King saga and any notion anyone ever had of balance went straight out the window.